Thursday, September 15, 2011

I love it! This hot one is from my good friend Guy. How many of us who live at the beach get great surf tunes from out friends in Canada!! Get it, spin it, dig it.

T

The Reverberators get off to a flying start and cover a lot of ground on this album. "Low Down" opens with a deep guitar riff which is picked up by bass and drums as the sax (which does not dominate, but adds a tasty edge) joins in. It's pure fifties 12-bar rock & roll which could be comin' at ya from vintage vinyl. One stirring original follows another, as so many surging surf riffs and runs blast out of the speakers. "Paint It Bond" is a fabulous marriage of the Stones song and a 007 theme, and other tunes conjure up a wonderful variety of rockin' sentiments. This is an excellent CD with great production, and is a beach party all on it's own. Top Marks!

The Dancing Cat label has been the chief vehicle for exposure of Hawaiian roots music on the mainland, particularly of the slack-key guitar style, a virtuosic fingerpicking genre that nonetheless is far more tranquil than frenetic. This acts as a label sampler, with cuts from 11 different albums in the Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Masters Series. With songs by the leading slack-key performers -- including Cyril Pahinui, Keola Beamer, Ray Kane, and Sonny Chillingworth -- it's a good introduction to the style, or a good collection for those who just want one representation of the form. It's surprisingly homogenous for a sampler, but then its serene washes of strings are very characteristic of the slack-key sound.

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Cred-heavy London imprint Soul Jazz Records presents a compilation of exclusive tracks trailed as Future Dub and Dubstep from key artists associated with a largely UK-based scene. Big punchers such as Skream, Scuba, Digital Mystikz, Kode 9 are assembled, as well as Sunday supplement crossover it-boy, Burial. Channeling the future sound of South London boroughs, Box of Dub seems to set out to draw more clearly the links between contemporary Dubstep producers and their pioneering precursors - early dub explorers such as King Tubby and Scientist. Judged in terms of the degree of innovation or "futurity" manifested by these contributors, the results are mixed, though overall the material represents a decent overview of various trajectories within the sphere of dub-derived electronic listening music.